Conservatism, R.I.P.

An interesting passage from "The Devil" (an 1889 Tolstoy short story):

It is generally supposed that Conservatives are usually old people, and that those in favor of change are the young. That is not quite correct. Usually Conservatives are young people; those who want to live but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life that they have seen.

Whether Tolstoy believed this or it was merely a convenient, philosophical preamble to his story--"The Devil"'s central character is reasonably well served by "Conservatism," though ruined by natural, libidinous passions--I cannot say. Nonetheless it's a theory that makes conservatives of us all, at least until we have "time to think."

I like the notion, anyway, in that it stands conservatism on its head. Mature conservatives, according to this imaginative Tolstoyan construction, are merely the unthoughtful young grown older. More than a few real, breathing conservatives, on the other hand, would have us believe they came to their conservatism honestly and consciously, even heroically--they're conservative for having scoured mountainous heaps of National Review and the Weekly Standard and suffered decades of intolerably oppressive liberal rule.

My own take is that in the United States the very word "conservative" has fractured into such philosophical meaninglessness that it now stands almost entirely as a synonym for "Republican," which itself reflects only an unshakable framework of--in equal or varying proportions--bitterness, resentment, superstition, ignorance, anti-intellectualism and racism.

As a coherent, political construct worthy of the designation "philosophy," conservatism has passed on--a victim, as they say, of its own 30-year success.

Comments

[Robert Lipscomb]

Many if not most of the founding fathers were adamantly hostile to "party" in politics because they had seen it corrupt so much of British governance. "Party" tends to run over reason which presumably would have been an anathema to disciples of The Enlightment of their time.

Political concepts such as conservative, liberal libertarian, socialism, progressive and so on are nothing but tools in a political toolbox to be used as needed and where needed. When one party adopts a single tool and villifies all other tools, it soon runs into the hard reality that, for instance, sometimes a screwdriver is the right tool rather than a paint brush. Once they have painted themselves into a corner, they can either admit that they need a screwdriver - or they can get a screwdriver and label it a paintbrush.

I suspect the Democratic Party was guilty of this for a while - you know, wear long hair, blue jeans, a t-shirt and saandals as a uniform to prove you are a nonconformist. the problem for the Republican Party and all the rest of us is that the logical extrapolation of Reaganism taken to its extreme is the dstruction of government and community if not outright nihlism.